When Joe Kent walked away from his post as the nation's top counterterrorism official to protest the Iran war, the Trump administration and Republican establishment treated it like a minor blip. But Kent's exit has cracked open a fault line that's proving much harder to ignore than party insiders hoped, Politico reported Thursday.
Within 36 hours, former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson brought Kent onto his massive podcast, and MAGA darling Candace Owens followed suit with a high-profile event at the Trump Hotel. The anti-war populist right seized the moment, and suddenly the narrative shifted from a routine resignation to a potential party-splitting crisis.
Politico warned there is a "clear risk in dismissing Kent."
The White House insists Kent's appearances amounted to nothing more than podcast chatter from an online fringe with no real electoral punch. Spokeswoman Davis Ingle dismissed Kent's concerns as "self-aggrandizing" and "riddled with lies."
“The president does not make these incredibly important national security decisions based on fluid opinion polls or podcast hosts, but on the best interest of the American people,” Ingle told the outlet.
But polls show GOP support for the Iran strikes has already slipped to 70 percent among Trump's own voters, and 81 percent of self-described MAGA Republicans.
“The influence of the kind of neo-isolationist, restrainer wing of a party is waning as real life hits them over the head with a frying pan,” said Tim Chapman, president of Advancing American Freedom, the organization founded by Trump’s first vice president, Mike Pence. “It’s not a tenable position anymore in the White House, because the White House is dealing with the real world — and they’re dealing with their online world that they want to be real, but it just isn’t the reality.”
Conservative editor Curt Mills warned: "If you concede that this was what differentiated Trump from, say, Mitt Romney, electorally, if you believe any of that crap, then the idea that none of these people’s opinions matter now, I think, is kind of silly."
Politico warned the fissure could "upend the fragile coalition" that Republicans have to keep stitched together ahead of the midterms.